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This book is about management of arctic and northern alpine research stations. It has been produced by a group of station managers participating in the EU 7th Framework Programme Infrastructure project called INTERACT. With this book we want to share the knowledge and experiences we have gained from managing very different research stations in very different environmental and climatic settings. The target audience for the book is mainly managers of research stations in arctic and alpine areas, but we hope that it will also be useful for others involved in science coordination and logistics, e.g. research institutions, chief scientists and expedition planners. The book has been produced mainly based on input from practising station managers being part of ‘INTERACT Station Managers’ Forum (SMF), a forum established to provide a platform for exchange of information between station managers and other participants within INTERACT, and to collect and disseminate knowledge embedded within the network. The scope of this book is to identify and describe best practices and key considerations of relevance to station management under arctic and alpine conditions. As research stations operate under very different legal regimes, financial conditions, environmental and climatic conditions, as well as remoteness, it is not possible to identify specific best practices that fit all stations. Instead, we have described key issues that should be considered and addressed by station management, and supplemented this with examples of good practices from stations operating under different conditions (e.g. different climate, remoteness or size).

Modern volcano monitoring commonly involves Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) measurements to identify ground motions caused by volcanic activity. However, InSAR is largely affected by changes in atmospheric refractivity, in particular by changes which can be attributed to the distribution of water (H2O) vapor in the atmospheric column. Gas emissions from continuously degassing volcanoes contain abundant water vapor and thus produce variations in the atmospheric water vapor content above and downwind of the volcano, which are notably well captured by short-wavelength X-band SAR systems. These variations may in turn cause differential phase errors in volcano deformation estimates due to excess radar path delay effects within the volcanic gas plume. Inversely, if these radar path delay effects are better understood, they may be even used for monitoring degassing activity, by means of the precipitable water vapor (PWV) content in the plume at the time of SAR acquisitions, which may provide essential information on gas plume dispersion and the state of volcanic and hydrothermal activity. In this work we investigate the radar path delays that were generated by water vapor contained in the volcanic gas plume of the persistently degassing Láscar volcano, which is located in the dry Atacama Desert of Northern Chile. We estimate water vapor contents based on sulfur dioxide (SO2) emission measurements from a scanning UV spectrometer (Mini-DOAS) station installed at Láscar volcano, which were scaled by H2O/SO2 molar mixing ratios obtained during a multi-component Gas Analyzer System (Multi-GAS) survey on the crater rim of the volcano. To calculate the water vapor content in the downwind portion of the plume, where an increase of water vapor is expected, we further applied a correction involving estimation of potential evaporation rates of water droplets governed by turbulent mixing of the condensed volcanic plume with the dry atmosphere. Based on these estimates we obtain daily average PWV contents inside the volcanic gas plume of 0.2–2.5 mm equivalent water column, which translates to a slant wet delay (SWD) in DInSAR data of 1.6–20 mm. We used these estimates in combination with our high resolution TerraSAR-X DInSAR observations at Láscar volcano, in order to demonstrate the occurrence of repeated atmospheric delay patterns that were generated by volcanic gas emissions. We show that gas plume related refractivity changes are significant and detectable in DInSAR measurements. Implications are two-fold: X-band satellite radar observations also contain information on the degassing state of a volcano, while deformation signals need to be interpreted with care, which has relevance for volcano observations at Láscar and for other sites worldwide.

The primary data sources for reconstructing the Earth's magnetic field of the past millennia are archeomagnetic and sedimentary paleomagnetic data. Sediment records, in particular, are crucial in extending the temporal and spatial coverage of global Earth's magnetic field models, especially when archeomagnetic data is sparse. However, the post-depositional remanent magnetization (pDRM) process is still poorly understood and can cause smoothing of the magnetic signal and offsets with respect to the sediment age. To make effective use of sedimentary data, it is essential to understand the lock-in process and its impact on the magnetic signal. In this study, we investigate the lock-in process theoretically and derive a parameterized lock-in function to approximate all possible lock-in behaviors. Additionally, we demonstrate that a lock-in function that is independent of absolute parameters can only be applied to the magnetic direction components, but not to the relative intensity. Integrating this lock-in function into the ArchKalMag14k modeling procedure (Schanner et al., 2022, https://doi.org/10.1029/2021JB023166) allows to include data from sediment records. The parameters of the lock-in function are estimated by maximum likelihood methods using archeomagnetic data as a reference. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated through synthetic tests. Additionally, it is applied to real sediment records. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method is capable of effectively correcting the distortion caused by the lock-in process, making data from sedimentary records a more reliable and informative source for Earth's magnetic field reconstructions. The 28th IUGG General Assembly (IUGG2023) (Berlin 2023)

A temporary seismic array was installed in combination with a meteorological station in the Dead Sea valley, Jordan. Within the scope of the HGF virtual institute DESERVE we operated 15 temporary seismic stations between February 2014 and February 2015 together with a nearby meteorological station close to the east coast of the Dead Sea. The main aim was to acquire data to study the influence of wind on seismic records and retrieve related meteorological parameters. The study area is scarcely populated and has ideal meteorological conditions to study periodically occurring winds.

Owing to its cool temperatures and vigorous water mass formation, the strongly eddying Southern Ocean is a key region of ocean CO2 uptake. In this study we assess the role of 1) wind stress and buoyancy forcing and 2) the representation of mesoscale eddies, in affecting the mean and temporal variations of the Southern Ocean carbon uptake in the past 60 years. We analyze global ocean biogeochemistry simulations based on the NEMO-MOPS and FESOM-REcoM models and ranging from 1° and 0.5° resolutions (where eddies are parameterized) to eddy-rich 0.25° and 0.1° resolutions. The 0.25° model is also used to perform sensitivity experiments to unravel the relative role of wind stress and of buoyancy forcing for the carbon uptake variations. We find that eddy-rich models have steeper isopycnals across the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which results in higher anthropogenic carbon uptake and storage than in models where eddies are parameterized. This, in combination with a somewhat lower outgassing of natural CO2, gives rise to a steeper trend of the Southern Ocean carbon uptake in the eddy-rich than in the eddy-parameterized models. Wind stress and buoyancy forcing are the main drivers of an increased outgassing of natural CO2 over the past decades and drive most of its interannual and decadal variability, with wind stress dominating at subpolar latitudes, and buoyancy forcing in water mass formation regions. However, our experiments indicate that the stalling of the Southern Ocean carbon uptake in the 1990s was mostly driven by a reduction of its anthropogenic carbon uptake. The 28th IUGG General Assembly (IUGG2023) (Berlin 2023)

The sample set includes 25 newly sampled sea-level index points based on fossil microatoll measurements from 5 islands in the Spermonde Archipelago, 21 fossl microatoll samples previously published by Mann et al., 2016 from two Islands in the same study region and 20 marine and terrestrial limiting points (e.g. corals, shells and loamy clay) and one further sea-level index point from a Mangrove swamp published by De Klerk, 1982 and Tjia et al., 1972

The Central Andes (~21°S) is a subduction-type orogeny formed in the last ~50 Ma from the subduction of the Nazca oceanic plate beneath the South American continental plate. However, the most important phases of deformation occur in the last 20 Ma. Pulses of shortening have led to the sudden growth of the by the Altiplano-Puna plateau. Previous studies have provided insights on the importance of various mechanisms on the overall shortening such as the weakening of the overriding plate from crustal eclogitization and delamination, or the importance of a relatively high friction at the subduction interface, and weak sediments in foreland. However none of them has addressed the mechanism behind these shortening pulses yet. Therefore, we built a series of high resolution 2D visco-plastic subduction models using the ASPECT geodynamic code, in which the oceanic plate is buoyancy-driven and the velocity of the continent is prescribed. We have also implemented a realistic geometry for the south American plate at ~30 Ma. We propose a new plausible mechanism (buckling and steepening of the slab) as the cause of these pulses. The buckling leads to the blockage of the trench. Consequently, the difference of velocity between the South American plate and the trench is accommodated by shortening. The data presented here includes the parameters files, for the reference model (S1) and the following alternative simulations: models with variation of the friction at the subduction interface (S2a-c), a model without eclogitization of the lower crust (S3) and a model with higher thermal conductivity of the upper crust (S4). Additionally, this publication includes the initial composition and thermal state of the lithosphere used for the models and a Readme file that gives all the instructions to run them.